What is the Benefit of Work Ready Reckoner

Find out how working full-time will impact your take home pay

If you’ve been receiving jobseeker’s payments, getting a new job can be an exciting experience. But it can also bring certain worries: in-work taxes and benefits can be difficult to calculate, and you may be concerned that you’ll actually end up with less money to spend than if you hadn’t taken the job at all. That’s where the ready reckoner is meant to help.

What is the Benefit of Work Ready Reckoner?

The Benefit of Work Ready Reckoner is a free service offered by the Department of Social Protection in Ireland. The idea behind it is to give you a clear indication of how your take-home pay will change when you’re moving from unemployment into full-time work.

You put in the weekly salary of a potential new job, input some information about yourself (like how long you’ve been out of work and whether you have any children) and the reckoner tots up the actual take-home pay you’d be earning after all the taxes and benefits for which you’re eligible have been factored in.

The information is presented in a clear, easy-to-read chart broken down by income source (the net salary, extra supports like Family Income Supplement, etc). The potential in-work income is shown next to the total value of your current welfare payments for easy comparison between the two.

You can use the ready reckoner here: http://bow.welfare.ie/. It’s totally anonymous and doesn’t require you to enter any follow-up or contact information.

Note that the ready reckoner is only meant for people moving from joblessness to full-time employment. It won’t be useful for people looking at becoming self-employed, working part-time, or moving between part-time and full-time work.